Back sometime during the holidays I purchased a set of pipe clamp fixtures to use on the larger projects that I want to take on. They’d be perfect on this buffet project. I’ve never gotten around to getting the actual pipes until this weekend, and the reason I purchased these particular clamps was mainly because of their price – Let’s just say I should’ve known better…

The clamps call for a 3/4″ pipe with an O.D. of 1.0625 (that’s an outside diameter of no greater than 1 1/16″). So yesterday I picked up two 10′ sections that matched the exact specs, and were threaded at both ends, and had the guy at HD cut them in half for me. I figured 5′  lengths should suffice. I brought them home and proceeded to attached the fixtures. Turns out that the inside diameter of each of the clutch discs was exactly the same size as the pipe – not even remotely allowing them to fit over the pipes. I went back to Rockler’s website to see if I could find any information that might help me out and I happen to click on the ‘Reviews‘ tab - to my unpleasant surprise I come to find that just about everyone who’s purchased these silly things has had the exact same problem. Now mind you – these reviews didn’t exist when I bought these clamps – had I seen them back then, you can definitely be sure I wouldn’t have made the purchase.

I knew that the clutch rings needed to be grinded down just a hair, but didn’t really have anything that could do the job. I thought maybe something like a small grinding stone that you can get for one of those Dremel tools would work, so this afternoon I picked up both a small rotary file and grinding stone bit that I could use in my drill. Using the file to get the initial material off first first, then following it up with the grinding stone, worked like a charm. It took me about an hour to do though because there were 16 of them and there was a lot of grinding and checking for fit, grinding some more, and checking some more… After all that, I was finally able to attach the fixtures without any issue. I reversed the position of the clutches too, because they seemed to work better when inserted opposite the way they came packaged.

I’ve just recently finished an audiobook by Malcolm Gladwell called ‘Blink’. It’s a few years old now and was recommended to me a while ago. I don’t read books all that often – just can’t get myself to get into the habit – but I really wanted to learn what this was all about, so I thought I would give the audiobook version a try. I have to admit, I think I’m hooked on the format. Anyway, to quote the author from the book’s site:

It’s a book about rapid cognition, about the kind of thinking that happens in a blink of an eye. When you meet someone for the first time, or walk into a house you are thinking of buying, or read the first few sentences of a book, your mind takes about two seconds to jump to a series of conclusions. Well, “Blink” is a book about those two seconds, because I think those instant conclusions that we reach are really powerful and really important and, occasionally, really good.

I was really struck by the number of stories he told and by the concept of thin slicing that he often referred to. It’s this notion that you can make sense of some type of situation or make a decision based on a very small amount of information (or a “thin slice”), and in many cases, get more accurate results than if you had a plethora of information about that particular situation, subject, or even individual.

If any of this sounds even remotely interesting to you, I’d recommend picking up a copy for yourself.

This afternoon I spent some time thinking about the cabinet and came up with a rough idea of how I want to approach it. What that usually means is that I either bust out the graph paper, start drafting, and making note of precise measurements or… jot down some chicken scratch numbers and sketch out what I want the thing to look like. In this case I went with the latter and came up with this:

It’s fairly straightforward and combines a few different ideas I got out of the decorating catalogues we get. Overall dimensions will be apx. 36″H x 42″W x 14″D (inside depth). The main cabinet carcass and facade will be painted an earthy green color and the top will be stained a shade of oak. Even though I’m going to paint most of it, I’m going to attempt to use as few mechanical fasteners as I can, and stick with traditional joinery and glue, just to try and challenge myself a bit. I used biscuit joints on my last cabinet’s face frame for example, but then nailed it to the carcass with brads. I’ll try to use the biscuits in this case again, but I may have to combine that with using lap joints to join the 1×2 rails with the 1×3′s stiles and mid-stile. Either that or possibly do a series of through mortiseses and tenons – I’m just not sure about doing that on such narrow stock.

Wow… This was a bit unexpected. Two sets of the romaine seedlings have already germinated as well as one of the cucumbers…

In continuing my efforts to try and get a process down for creating these raised panels, I ran two tests through my table saw again tonight. I first ran a scrap 2×4 through my dado blade to get a notch that cleared the blade. Then I clamped it down, perpendicular to the blade so that it could act as a guide for the boards.

I left the dado on for this the first test run, thinking that the wider cut might help – I wasn’t impressed. It was a bit difficult to run the board through, but I may have been a bit overzealous in trying to cut too much material out on my first pass.

I removed everything, including the dado, and put back my normal blade. I reset the guide and clamped it down.

This time I started off with a shallower cut and ran another test board through. I did a 2nd pass on all four sides after raising the blade a bit more and that seemed to give me decent results.

A little sanding on the slopes and these should look nice.  At the same though, I’m not too fond of the tension that seems to be on the blade when hitting it perpendicular like this. I’m hitting the blade on the back side and I’m wondering if I reverse the blade if it would make the cut a bit smoother - perhaps another test is in order…